Towards Cascaded V-Net for Automatic Accurate Kidney Segmentation from Abdominal CT Volumes

Abdominal kidney segmentation plays an essential role in diagnosis and treatment of kidney diseases, particularly in surgical planning and clinical outcome analysis before and after kidney surgery. It still remains challenging to precisely segment the kidneys from CT images. Current segmentation approaches still suffer from CT image noises and variations caused by different CT scans, kidney location discrepancy, pathological morphological diversity among patients, and partial volume artifacts. This paper proposes a fully automatic kidney segmentation method that employs a volumetric convolution driven cascaded V-Net architecture and false positive reduction to precisely extract the kidney regions. We evaluate our method on publicly available kidney CT data. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method is a promising method for accurate kidney segmentation, providing a dice coefficient of 0.95 better than other approaches as well less computational time.